Rocking Horse and Singing Deva
A
Town Called Panic directed by StŽphan Aubier & Vincent Patar
Sita
Sings the Blues directed by Nina Paley
 
Belgians
know Surrealism. Give them a few cheap plastic figurines and theyÕll come
up with an absurdist universe to out-Gumby Art Clokey. Something happens
when I enter Gumbyville: The frontal lobe takes the back seat. The
following plot summary would have been impossible without the help of my
six-year-old:
Horse is a single dad
with two loud but well-meaning pre-teens, Indian and Cowboy. Or they could
be friends (according to my boy). Horse has a crush on Mrs. Longray, a
red-haired mare who teaches piano at the music academy. Their
not-so-peaceful rural existence is thrown into a cement mixer when Indian
and Cowboy learn itÕs HorseÕs birthday. They go online and buy bricks to
build a barbecue. Soon a procession of delivery trucks unloads 50 million
bricks, instead of the 50 they thought theyÕd ordered. The weight of the bricks
sinks their house into the ground, so they use the bricks to rebuild it,
only to have it stolen by a family of pointy-headed aquatic villains. In
the ensuing search and retrieval mission, they fall to the center of the
Earth (during which they play cards), surface in Antarctica (my boy says
itÕs the North Pole) and meet scientists who build robots that make giant
snowballs.
This being a town
called Panic, lines are not so much delivered as shouted. There are some
texture-enhancing rock and hip-hop songs (in French) that add to the
raucous proceedings. Logic zigs and zags, and it is impossible to keep a
linear tab on the story, but that just might be what your soul has been
thirsting for. My multilingual first-grader laughed his way through it ÐÐ
three times ÐÐ and has been re-enacting the frenzied exchanges between
Horse, Indian and Cowboy ever since.
Nina
Paley, on the other hand, likes pretty. And lush. Call that a girl thing.
In the Paley-written-directed-produced-animated Sita Sings the Blues, the story of king Rama
(incarnation of some god or other) and his devoted and beautiful queen Sita
(ditto) parallels the story of a breakup of a San Francisco couple (in a
simpler, hand-drawn style). Call it a girl thing, too, that the blacker the
despair the more bloody-beautiful it has to be. And the deeper the
sorrow, the bigger the conduit: Paley chose the Ramayana, one of the twin columns of
the epic Vedas (the other being the Mahabharata).
Sita is abducted in
RamaÕs absence by Ravana, a rival king made almost immortal by demons.
Being a hero, Rama rescues Sita, then, although she is pregnant with his
twin boys, he dumps her. If Rama is colored blue, itÕs Sita who sings the
blues: ÒIÕm no good without my man,Ó as recorded by Annette Hanshaw in the
1920s.
Paley wisely lets three
unscripted voices round out the dual saga with commentary (my favorite: ÒNo
oneÕs commending Ravana for not forcing himself on SitaÓ). Genghis Khan
rescued his wife from her abductors and raised her son as his own without
ever asking a question. But Rama here is no Khan. As for the selfish and
communication-challenged ex in the contemporary breakup, well, he was
little more than a stick figure anyway.
Poppy graphics and
hand-painted characters (shades of Karel ZemanÕs Adventures of Sinbad
the Sailor)
are layered with collages of Hindu trading cards over ever-changing digital
flora. The barely-there scratches from the 1920s vinyl are assuaged by the luxuriant
Indian tonalities of the score.
Paley generously
reserves judgment on the first sex (the Blue One sheds a single tear),
except at the end of the film, itÕs the goddess whoÕs having her feet
massaged by the god.
ÐÐ
Rika Ohara
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